what do these numbers mean and what do they portend for the fiscal cliff negotiations? >> it strengthens the president's hand. it was a good number, not great, because of some of the revisions we saw to previous months but the president can tout a record of job creation, so that's encouraging. the unemployment rate went down to 7.7% for some of the wrong reasons. a lot of people left the labor force. that's not something you want to see. you want to see more people coming into the labor force, encouraged that they have a chance at getting a job. nonetheless, 146,000 jobs created. that's good for the president. gives him a chance to go out there and have some momentum going into the fiscal cliff talks. i was just at the speaker's press conference down the hall at the top of last hour and he said look, there's no progress being made and his call with the president was just more of the same and the staff talks behind the scenes yesterday were more of the same. he didn't give us a whole lot of optimism going into this weekend here, alex. >> here's my question. i have many q